


gardenia

by cicadas



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, Memory Loss, Mental Illness, Mental Instability, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 19:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14859024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicadas/pseuds/cicadas
Summary: Wade's brain was constantly regenerating. He lost memories, pockets of time here and there, but made up for it by talking loud enough to fill the holes until they seemed solid enough to be real. He wanted it to be real.Sometimes he wasn't sure.





	gardenia

  
The boxes were a constant.

Scars, chimichangas, lack of eyebrows, a lingering erection from being manhandled by Logan a few years back, unaliving people, the boxes. Constant breathing parts of him that didn't go away when he tried to carve them out with a Winchester. Sometimes he found it funny that he scarred after healing. Most of the time he didn't.

Like his molten trainwreck of a dermis, the boxes changed with the seasons, if those seasons were regulated by toddlers on Ritalin. Sometimes he could see them with his own two baby blues. Yellow and White, comic font in two seperate shapes, hovering around his head, words now text he didn't need to read to hear.

Sometimes they were outside voices. Loud and clear. Distinct, like someone possibly familiar. Sometimes they were people he'd killed.

He'd killed a lot of people.

 

Take Denise, for example. Denise was a cunt.

Child neglect charges, let off. Arrested for possession, out in a year with good behaviour. Had another kid, dad split, and Momma Denise was left to her own devices once more.  
Admittedly, Wade was in a bit of a dark place when he shot the back the back of her skull onto the magnets of the woman's very own fridge-freezer. That didn't mean he didn't set the kid up in a police station with a blanket and a half-full tin of cinnamon mints (just in case she got hungry). It did mean he stayed to watch the blood and brain matter seep down the fridge and drip onto the linoleum. Watched it pool and spread until it hit his boots, then opened that same door, took a beer from the bottom shelf and drank it down before the thought of leaving ever crossed his mind.

_(Crossed)_

Sometimes the boxes were just noise. Words and phrases repeated over and over. Whether they made sense or not depended on Wade's ability to comprehend what was going on in his own head at that given time. At any given time.

There were times when Wade questioned his own sanity.  
Those days were always made better by comforting words from the voices in his head.

 

 _Clockwork._  
_Watchtower._  
_Nosedive.  
__Marshmallow._

 

They were on compound words. Yellow must have been digging through grade school lessons.

{Did we go to grade school?}

[I'm sure we did. Learned about frogs and broke that blonde girl's nose in the bathroom.]

{I hated her. What a bitch}

[We should have cracked her skull]

{Now that's taking it too far}

"Too far."

 

 _Snowball._  
_Breakfast._  
_Flowerpot._

 

He didn't understand them. Their purpose, their words. Were they his own fucked up thoughts projected in the form of text boxes (voices, Wade. Giving them a name is a good way to be comfortable with them but we need to understand that-) or did they come from somewhere else? The Somewhere no-one else saw, but he was so sure was real, controlling him, creating the world around him. Then things would snap back, and he'd be standing confused on a rooftop completely alone, and he always saw things nobody else saw so why was this different? Why was this real? How could it be.

There were so many parts of himself he didn't trust.

Memories, feelings, ideas. Didn't know whether they were natural or implanted or grew from some tumor in the back of his brain that was slowly being eaten away by his regenerative cells.

{Well of course that's not true. Tumors can cause personality changes- but we don't have a tumor}

[Unless you count our entire brain]

{We are perfectly healthy.}

[Scarred and mangled just like the fucking thing inside our skull]

 

 

On his last job he'd killed a man who said he knew him. In the biblical sense. Some kind of weekend-away-from-the-wife-and-kids romantic tryst that could have taken place somewhere in his memory. It seemed realistic. A lovely vacation from a job of unaliving bad guys, handsome guy with the beginnings of a three-day-growth. He wanted to believe it.  
But he couldn't remember. And the boxes wanted blood.

The voices didn't trust him, and he didn't trust his memory. It was in a warehouse, three others dead - this one seemingly in the wrong place at the wrong time, but there was a hardness to his eyes, seemed to be staring  _into_  him, and Wade couldn't think. So the guy bled. 

Eight weeks. Wade thought about him, laying outside on hard concrete, _trying,_  trying his best to remember something - anything - about the man's face. The scratch of his facial hair. What he smelled like. If he could have- Had he- ?  
Did they drink old fashioned's at a dingy bar and stumble home, Wade holding the other up as the alcohol quickly left his system, laughing as they walked. Did they have sex in a hotel bed with infomercials playing in the background? Thin sheets and dim walls. Would that make sense, for them to do that? Had they met somewhere unfamiliar? Was the memory gone or did it just not exist in the first place?

He had cracked the guy's skull. Blown it apart with a bullet to the forehead. Right between the eyes.

They were brown. He remembered that.

 

 _Alfalfa._  
_Divider._  
_Enchilada._  
_(Enchilada.)_  
_(Enchilada.)_

 

{Thinking about Mr. 5th of June again? Let it go.}

[He was lying]

"No. I don't think he was."

 

Gardenia. He'd smelled like gardenia. Thought it was so funny - such a sweet, soft smell for a man in a three piece suit with a whiskey in his hand. He'd asked him what it was, payed for his next drink. He'd thanked him for the drink, put his hand on Wade's chest. He'd told him. 'Gardenia. It's gardenia and jasmine.'

 

 _Redback._  
_Huntsman._  
_Tarantula._  
_Brown recluse._  
_Common house-_  
  
Spiders.

 

He hadn't seen Spidey in a while. Sometime's they'd get chimichangas from the absolutely superior corner store Wade had found by being bodily thrown into it one day, but it'd been months. Had it? Surely not. Maybe longer. Maybe less. He was busy lately, and time seemed to stand still and disappear all at once. Something he could never fully grab hold of.

He liked Spidey. He spoke, and he listened, and he knew about the boxes and even spoke to them sometimes, on one occasion calling them a cunt. Or maybe that was Wade himself, and Spidey had nodded and patted his arm and smiled. Wade liked to think he'd smiled - he couldn't exactly see through the mask. Hadn't seen the face underneath. Though there was the time when they ate together, and Wade swallowed the bile in his throat and rolled his mask up to shovel Mexican food into his mouth, eyes trained on Spidey doing the same. His jaw was sharp and his lips were pink, stained with salsa.

 

 _Hibiscus._  
_Rose._  
_Violet.  
_

 

{This isn't helping.}

[This isn't helping.]

(Stop thinking about it, forget about it, we'll forget about it easy if we stop lingering)

 

5th of June. Whiskey neat and a grey suit. What the fuck was he doing? What the fuck was he doing? What the fuck-

They were external, yelling at him, but he was close. This time. It was something real. He hadn't made this up.

 

He was a pretty guy, masculine but not bulky, filling out the suit nicely, making Wade want to take it  _off_  him to get to what was underneath. He felt comfortable to be around. Comforting. It was like walking into somewhere familiar. His home, when Mama was still around and cooking dinners early in the morning to 'let it stew' and the smell lingered in the rooms all day until it was time to eat.

He remembered that much. Whether the rest was true or something he'd made up - something he'd formed around the man's last words to make them real in his mind - he wasn't sure.  
But he smelled like gardenia, and his lips were so soft they had to have been invented by Wade's own mind, and he mumbled into the pillow he'd drooled on overnight.

 

 

He wanted to believe it so bad.

 

[They've always tried to get inside our head. Make us pause just long enough to reconsider. He did just that.]

{We can't trust them.}

"Right."

[Of course we are]

 

It wasn't a weekend away. He remembered that much. They met for the first time at that bar. He didn't know if they met again after that, but that didn't matter. He was dead. The guy didn't have a wife or kids. He was single. Mid to late twenties, judging by the smile lines on his forehead and around his eyes. Brown eyes.

He'd smelled like gardenia.

 

  
'I'm Peter.' He'd said, and his voice was as sweet as the scent on his collar. 'Why don't you walk me home?'

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> ...
> 
> this started off as a vent fic for my own voices, then this happened.


End file.
